The maple-bordered street was as still as a country Sunday; so quiet
that there seemed an echo to my footsteps. It was four o'clock in the
morning; clear October moonlight misted through the thinning foliage to
the shadowy sidewalk and lay like a transparent silver fog upon the
house of my admiration, as I strode along, returning from my first
night's work on the "Wainwright Morning Despatch."
I had already marked that house as the finest (to my taste) in
Wainwright, though hitherto, on my excursions to this metropolis, the
state capital, I was not without a certain native jealousy that
Spencerville, the county-seat where I lived, had nothing so good. Now,
however, I approached its purlieus with a pleasure in it quite
unalloyed, for I was at last myself a resident (albeit of only one day's
standing) of Wainwright, and the house--though I had not even an idea
who lived there--part of my possessions as a citizen. Moreover, I might
enjoy the warmer pride of a next-door-neighbor, for Mrs. Apperthwaite's,
where I had taken a room, was just beyond.
This was the quietest part of Wainwright; business stopped short of it,
and the "fashionable residence section" had overleaped this "forgotten
backwater," leaving it undisturbed and unchanging, with that look about
it which is the quality of few urban quarters, and eventually of none,
as a town grows to be a city--the look of still being a neighborhood.
This friendliness of appearance was largely the emanation of the homely
and beautiful house which so greatly pleased my fancy.
It might be difficult to say why I thought it the "finest" house in
Wainwright, for a simpler structure would be hard to imagine; it was
merely a big, old-fashioned brick house, painted brown and very plain,
set well away from the street among some splendid forest trees, with a
fair spread of flat lawn. But it gave back a great deal for your glance,
just as some people do. It was a large house, as I say, yet it looked
not like a mansion but like a home; and made you wish that you lived in
it. Or, driving by, of an evening, you would have liked to hitch your
horse and go in; it spoke so surely of hearty, old-fashioned people
living there, who would welcome you merrily.
It looked like a house where there were a grandfather and a grandmother;
where holidays were warmly kept; where there were boisterous family
reunions to which uncles and aunts, who had been born there, would
return from no matter what distances; a house where big turkeys would be
on the table often; where one called "the hired man" (and named either
Abner or Ole) would crack walnuts upon a flat-iron clutched between his
knees on the back porch; it looked like a house where they played
charades; where there would be long streamers of evergreen and dozens of
wreaths of holly at Christmas-time; where there were tearful, happy
weddings and great throwings of rice after little brides, from the broad
front steps: in a word, it was the sort of a house to make the hearts of
spinsters and bachelors very lonely and wistful--and that is about as
near as I can come to my reason for thinking it the finest house in
Wainwright.
The moon hung kindly above its level roof in the silence of that October
morning, as I checked my gait to loiter along the picket fence; but
suddenly the house showed a light of its own. The spurt of a match took
my eye to one of the upper windows, then a steadier glow of orange told
me that a lamp was lighted. The window was opened, and a man looked out
and whistled loudly.
I stopped, thinking that he meant to attract my attention; that
something might be wrong; that perhaps some one was needed to go for a
doctor. My mistake was immediately evident, however; I stood in the
shadow of the trees bordering the sidewalk, and the man at the window
had not seen me.
"Boy! Boy!" he called, softly. "Where are you, Simpledoria?"
He leaned from the window, looking downward. "Why, THERE you are!" he
exclaimed, and turned to address some invisible person within the room.
"He's right there, underneath the window. I'll bring him up." He leaned
out again. "Wait there, Simpledoria!" he called. "I'll be down in a
jiffy and let you in."
Puzzled, I stared at the vacant lawn before me. The clear moonlight
revealed it brightly, and it was empty of any living presence; there
were no bushes nor shrubberies--nor even shadows--that could have been
mistaken for a boy, if "Simpledoria" WAS a boy. There was no dog in
sight; there was no cat; there was nothing beneath the window except
thick, close-cropped grass.
A light shone in the hallway behind the broad front doors; one of these
was opened, and revealed in silhouette the tall, thin figure of a man in
a long, old-fashioned dressing-gown.
"Simpledoria," he said, addressing the night air with considerable
severity, "I don't know what to make of you. You might have caught your
death of cold, roving out at such an hour. But there," he continued,
more indulgently; "wipe your feet on the mat and come in. You're safe
NOW!"
He closed the door, and I heard him call to some one up-stairs, as he
rearranged the fastenings:
"Simpledoria is all right--only a little chilled. I'll bring him up to
your fire."
I went on my way in a condition of astonishment that engendered, almost,
a doubt of my eyes; for if my sight was unimpaired and myself not
subject to optical or mental delusion, neither boy nor dog nor bird nor
cat, nor any other object of this visible world, had entered that opened
door. Was my "finest" house, then, a place of call for wandering ghosts,
who came home to roost at four in the morning?
It was only a step to Mrs. Apperthwaite's; I let myself in with the key
that good lady had given me, stole up to my room, went to my window, and
stared across the yard at the house next door. The front window in the
second story, I decided, necessarily belonged to that room in which the
lamp had been lighted; but all was dark there now. I went to bed, and
dreamed that I was out at sea in a fog, having embarked on a transparent
vessel whose preposterous name, inscribed upon glass life-belts,
depending here and there from an invisible rail, was SIMPLEDORIA.
Read next: CHAPTER II
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